Re: [MacPerl] Shuck, AS, Perl, whatever, Pt 3.

[Bart Lateur <bart.mediamind@tornado.be>]

Robyn wrote:
 
> What is Shuck?

Stop hiding under that rock! :)  When was the last time you updated to
one of the later versions of MacPerl?

Shuck is, as the about box says, a "Lightwight POD Viewer". It's one of
those nifty utilities that Matthias has included with the latest
*standard* distributions of MacPerl. BTW, I love it. Thanks Matthias!

A year ago, html promised to become *the* standard for online
cross-platform documentation. (No) Thanks to that horrible feature race
between Netscape and MS-IE, html browsers are fastly becoming terribly
bloated programs. That way, those people are shooting in their own feet.

Nowadays, a common browser needs over 4Mb of memory to run acceptably.
OK on their own, but horrible if you need to run it next to several
other programs. This is the case if you want to use it for a online help
system. Shuck only needs 384k!

Shuck doesn't use html, but a vaguely comparable file format, known as
"pod" (Pages Of Description). It is a rather widely accepted format on
Unix systems.


BTW, although I'm not a native English speaker, I think there's
something wrong with the idea of a corn cob. The word "pod" rather makes
me think of beans or peas, not corn. Am I wrong?


Finally, one minor "bug". The first time I tried to use help using
Shuck, I thought I'd have to manually skim through the whole file
myself. Some indication that the program is actually *working*, when
it's searching for keywords, (like a changing mouse pointer :), would be
very nice. After all, this task may take up to a few seconds (on my
system).


-- 
		Bart Lateur
		Gent (Ghent, Gand),
		Belgium,
		Europe,
		3rd planet from the sun.